JWW: As an initial experiment, this couple contacted prospective partners through an underground newspaper. Other contacts were made at a bar which caters to swinging couples. The results, while not wholly unsuccessful, were not what they were looking for.
“The novelty of doing this made it very exciting, I got a tremendous thrill the first time I saw Ruth in another guy’s arms, getting pleasure from him and giving pleasure to him. And we liked the idea of being able to cut through the usual phony conventions of relationships and have sex out in the open. What put us off was that these people did not really want to know us. They just wanted to ball us. They were holding themselves back. Well, a certain amount of that is probably inevitable at first. You’re naturally uptight about putting it all out in front with someone you don’t know yet. But the thing was that they didn’t want to get to know us. I mean, one time I was having a really great time with this girl, kissing her breasts and giving her a nice lazy finger wave, and I looked up at her and said, ‘I love you.’ Because I had a great feeling of tenderness and love for her at that moment. Well, she went all pale and told me never to say that, and that just killed the whole thing for both of us. She couldn’t really respond because she was afraid I was going to fuck things up by falling in love with her, and I couldn’t really get into anything with her because I knew how she felt, and I kept picking up all her negative vibes, and it was a very bad scene. We ultimately did screw, probably more out of a sense of obligation than any real desire, but she had screwed up what could have been a really together experience, and I knew that as far as she was concerned, I had screwed it up.
“After that, I stopped telling women I loved them, but it was always the same kind of scene. And also we would meet a couple and after sitting around with them for a few hours we would know that we didn’t have much in common and would never be really close friends, but the situation was so structured that you had to go ahead and have sex or you would be putting them down. It was all very stupid, because we were getting just what we didn’t want, finding ourselves locked into balling people we didn’t even like, or guarding our emotions with people so as not to do bad things to their heads.
“So we gave the whole thing up, but we still liked the idea of it. Our last shot was with a couple who wrote an ad that appealed to us. The ad implied that they wanted only to meet people with their heads together who wanted a really meaningful relationship. This looked great on paper, but it turned out that for them the definition meant we would all smoke dope together and be bisexual. The dope was cool, but we weren’t sure about the bisexual part, and also, they were no more into the idea of emotional intimacy than any of the others, so we turned off to the whole scene.
“Then there was this couple we became friendly with, Dan and Judy, and one time Dan and I were alone together and we were talking about something to do with sex, and for some reason or other I told him about our experience. I didn’t have it in mind that they would be interested. I just felt open enough with Dan so that I felt I could talk about these scenes we had been involved in.
“It turned out that he and Judy had gone through a lot of the same changes, but hadn’t done anything about it to the extent that we had. The closest they came was when a college roommate of Dan’s was staying with them for a few weeks, and the roommate balled Judy one afternoon while Dan was at work, and they told him about it when he came home; and after a certain amount of getting it all together, they worked out a three-in-a-bed scene which they stayed with until the roommate split for the Coast.
“We worked it out that I dug Judy and he dug Ruth, and that we would discuss it with the girls and see what happened. What happened was that we all balled the next night. One thing I have to admit is that now that we had this intimacy that we had always wanted, I came very close to freaking. I heard Dan and Ruth telling each other how they loved each other, and I got a stab of jealousy that I couldn’t believe. But then it just got washed away by this tremendous feeling of well-being, this sense that everything was really right for the first time. Of the four of us, everybody genuinely loves everybody else. The important thing isn’t the sex. It’s the way the sex is a part of everything else and it all goes together so completely.
“At the present time, we’re considering another couple. The guy works in Dan’s office, and the six of us have been together quite a few times, and Ruth and Judy and Dan and I agree that we have the right kind of feelings toward them. And we think that three couples would be better than two. The big thing now is deciding how to broach this to them. I think their heads are in the right place, but we’ve never gotten into the topic of love-based friendships with them and don’t know for sure how they’ll handle it. We don’t want to be laying any trips on them. What we may do is let it come out in conversation that the four of us have this thing going, and see where it goes from there. Actually, we’re just about at the point now with them where it’s artificial to keep them from knowing what kind of scene we have going. We know them too well to have that kind of secret from them.
“Sometimes the question of group marriage comes up, but none of us can really see that, not in our case. As close as we are, Dan and Judy are a unit, and Ruth and I are a unit. We prefer it that way. It’s important to belong to your friends, but it’s also important to belong in a special way to just one other person. For us, anyhow.
“The feelings we all have for each other, it all makes every other friendship we’ve any of us ever had seem like nothing at all. And you just can’t compare our situation to meeting strangers in a bar and taking them home and fucking them and then never seeing them again. It’s so completely different in every respect.”
JWW: A great many swingers see themselves as riding the wave of the future, and certainly the growth of the custom has been dramatic enough. I sometimes suspect, though, that our attitudes are evolving toward a point where swinging will ultimately become obsolete. Based as it is on the principle of emotional monogamy, it cannot logically outlive that principle. I’m sure that the sexual relationship described above has far more attraction for the idealistic young than the emotionally sterile swinging seen elsewhere in this chapter.
As we have seen, the swinging marriage makes extramarital sex a function of the marriage itself. Another new style in marriage similarly facilitates extramarital sex, but in a way which replaces togetherness with the acknowledgment of the rights of privacy. Partners in a permissive marriage subscribe to a concept of matrimony which allows for extramarital sexual relations — and even extramarital love — within a fundamentally monogamous framework.
Going Separate Ways
“Let me tell you, folks, my wife and I have discovered the secret of a happy marriage. It’s the double bed. Yes, the double bed — one in her house and one in mine.”
The bit of nightclub shtick quoted above has led a venerable life. In an East Side cheaters’ joint the other night I heard it again for the first time in ten years. It got as good a laugh as ever, perhaps because it was so well suited to its audience.
For a substantial number of American married couples, the line’s humor is underscored with truth. In the permissive marriage, the secret of marital success is, if not double beds in separate houses, the ability to go separate ways and lead separate lives. The options open to partners in a permissive marriage include but are not necessarily limited to that of engaging in extramarital sexual relations. Such relations are undertaken not jointly, as in swinging, but individually.